California Wants to Force Vaccinate...

A new bill before the California senate would effectively strip parents' rights to make vaccination decisions for their children.

When Dr. Richard Pan’s bill, AB 2019, was debated in a public hearing before California’s Senate Committee on Health, Dawn Richardson, Director of Advocacy for the National Vaccination Information Center (NVIC), showed up to explain why she and her organization opposed the bill. If the bill is enacted into law, Richardson says, it will in effect force mandatory vaccinations onto children even when their parents have decided it’s in their best interest to deny them. Under current law, parents may file a “personal belief exemption” which allows their children to attend public school without vaccinations. But under Pan’s bill, a doctor must sign off on the parents’ decision first, and most of them won’t.